Node Catastrophe
The ancient world did not end on a date. It lost the rules by which dates made sense: elves dissolved, dwarves fixed themselves into machinery, dragons faded, and the Machine cracked without dying.
When the Old World Broke
The Catastrophe of the Separation Node is called an event only because later historians need a noun. In the world's own logic it was an ontological rupture: a change in what kinds of existence could continue at all. The divine ages had been states rather than calendars. Elven Harmony dissolved personal difference into a world-scale order; dwarven Structure fixed existence into matter and function. When the old balancing system failed, those forms did not simply lose a war. They ceased to remain viable in the same way.
The stable consequences are clearer than the immediate cause. Elves vanish as a civilization, many dissolving into nature, elemental memory, ice, mirrors or place-bound spirits. Dwarven identity is drawn into structures that continue to work without living masters: empty forge-cities, automatic mechanisms, bodies fixed into iron logic. Dragons cease to operate as the ancient force they once were. The Separation Machine cracks but does not disappear. The old gods withdraw from ordinary history, later remembered as sleeping, bound or beyond the divine Tablets.
After the rupture comes the Dark Interval, which is deliberately undated. Thousands of years may have passed, millions, or no meaningful duration at all, because the conditions needed for human chronology were themselves unsettled. This is why later excavations find not a neat archaeological layer but incompatible survivals: a ruin that behaves like a machine, a forest that remembers an elf, a sarcophagus waiting outside local Time. Human civilization begins after a gap that history can describe only as absence.
The world bible preserves incompatible explanations for the rupture, and they should remain incompatible. One line of thought says the Machine was already doomed when personal Time and free Will entered reality; another tells of Cybele using the elven-dwarven network as a route of incursion; another makes the rupture the very moment from which Dionysus emerged. The common ground is more important than choosing a single mythic culprit: the old system tried to hold reality without freedom, and the world that followed could no longer be contained by the same rules.
